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August 22, 2004

Tabooing the Past

If I were to ask an Engineer how he arrived at his current job, he would likely answer with something superficial such as having had a contact, sending in his resume or impressing in the interview. While these facts may be true, it is not the greater truth, thus making it somewhat of a fallacy, via the omission of a continuum of other truths.

In reality, the way that the person likely landed the job is from the creation of the facts on his resume. Likely, he had to go to college and get a degree. Likely, he had to have a pretty descent high schooling to prepare him for college matriculation. Likely, he had to have someone instill in him the value and need for education. Likely, he had to have parents to provide him with an environment conducive to facilitating intellectual career aspirations…and so on and so forth.

Thus, one can see a continuum of actions and reactions the sum up to explain his current present reality of being a practicing Engineer at a company. How much one uses this continuum of actions and reaction to explain the present represents the degree of truth in their reasoning. Thus, in debating, the juxtaposition is not between truth and falsity, but rather, degrees of truth. Most people use truths in their arguments, but is a truth that represents the exception to the rule of the aggregate, equal to a truth the represents the general rule of the aggregate?

It is amazing, but not surprising, to me how most people dismiss the past. The past creates the present. Yet, there has been an conspiracy of like minded interest to turn the interjection of the past, to explain the present, into a taboo. It is similar to what is happening now with interjecting the accusation of racism upon those who show symptoms their of. Not surprisingly, it is generally the same group of people that are tying to make taboos out of both.

The reason that the past has become taboo is because the people or groups that currently hold power, don’t want people to remember just how they came into this power and who they hurt in the process. If one looks at many of the conflicts of the world today, they are issues most often concerning territory and boundaries. What is rarely mentioned, however, is that most of the borders and territories of the world were shaped by the European through their centuries of imperialism, militarism and colonization.

In the process of creating borders to serve the interest of European powers, homogenous groups of people were split apart and non homogenous people were grouped together, often fermenting divisions and rivalries that still plague these lands. Some were deprived of valuable rich territory. For example, much of the problems of the Middle East today were created from borders imposed by Britain after the fall of the Ottoman Empire and from the decision of Western Whites to create a state of Israel proper, where no such state was recognized in that territory at the time. Every since those actions a continuum of reactions have consistently been reverberating through the region, including Iraq annexation of Kuwait, which lead to the first Gulf war.

Of course, the issue of slavery, Jim Crow, the near extermination of the Natives of the America’s is a powerful motivation for making talk of the past taboo. Instead, people aligned with the elites like to employ “snap shot” reasoning. This reasoning is a one dimensional in that it simply takes a point in time, then use conjecture and not the past, to explain it. For example. The fact that the black poverty rate in America for blacks is 3 times the rate for whites is explained by taking a snap shot of statistics such as children born out of wedlock or poor educational performance relative to others.

What these people do not want to employ is the past record of events that culminated into the present. This could be called the “video” version of events in that it captures the all important time continuum and actions and reactions and causes and effects. This is totally illogical, if not disingenuous, given that we all know that the present is created from the events of the past. Thus, using the “snap shot” truth and omitting the “video” truth is a means of obfuscating the total truth, due to an agenda of personal interest. Every action produces a reaction, but many of the elites and their wannabe cronies want to propagate the belief that all the recorded wrongs of Americas past, has nothing to do with its current present.

Not much I can say to actually add to the content here besides the fact that Tabooing The Past is epidemic and a proverbial Growth Industry.

Its so bad that people say, "That's in the past" as if by simply stating that alone proves a point. No thought is given to whether to what the effect of the past were. There is some imaginary world where these people who say such inane and unthinking things such as that would like to believe that there is no Cause & Effect; no consequences or ramifications or even impressions (as in indelible behaviorial modes that have survived) that the past has left as an indication that it was here.

Like the popular graffiti on a bridge or tree left by someone who had some desire to be remembered, THE PAST WAS HERE and it has left definite and unmistakeable signs of its existence that we can see today, relived especially by those who choose not to learn from it and really investigate what the past means and how it shapes who we are today.

"Those ignorant of history are doomed to repeat it."

It's interesting to note how history is taught as a series of mostly isolated facts and more or less basically rendered as unrelated if not irrelevant to how things really are today. "We're different now"... the sentiments goes yet nowhere in there are there intensive focus on what the consequences or ramifications were from what happened in the past.

Again, its as if it existed in a vaccuum and nothing ever really became of it (as in Equal & Opposite Reactions) and there are no consequences to pay because of that.

This article is on point. What never ceases to amaze me is the same people and individuals that want you to forget the past rarely ever see a need to confront their mistakes,reconsider their biases, examine themselves, or correct the wrongs they did to you. This applies to life gnerally.